NHL Recovery?

With the NHL lockout seemingly never ending and fans caring less and less over the past years, can hockey ever recover? In hockey towns, where fan interest and overall coverage of the league is falling, how can small towns recover. Places like Calgary, Atlanta, Nashville, San Jose, etc. can't compete with the likes of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, places where hockey started. Even places like Montreal are having a hard time drawing and now with the ice and arena's empty the NHL has a huge PR nigtmare ahead of them. Baseball had it with it's strkie and respond with the Sosa/McGwire slugfest that drew everyone back in. I don't see the NHL having one of those to fall back on. Hockey has never been accepted as a mainstream sport. The rules are foreign and complicated to the casual fan. The fighting turns people off left and right. And unless you live in one of the original 6 towns, hockey might as well be soccer. I don't know what the NHL has to do to get it's own fans back and at the same time get new fans invloved. Lowering ticket prices is an option, but after a lockout for a full season, the teams need to make up lost revenue, so that is out of the question. The league players and fans probably can't name 5 other players on 2 different teams. The days of Gretzky, Lemeuix, Bourque, Bossey, Guy Lefleur, the Hartford Whalers, and the mighty Canadiens are over. The league expanded too fast and put teams in places they don;t belong. You'll never get the league to fold teams because the players union will have fit. Much better to load the league with teams and then watch them fail, move them to a different city and watch them flounder there and ruin the league. The NHL took a leap past the NBA by locking itself out. The NBA is floundering in cities where people don't care and it hurt the league. The NHL jumped early into expantion and killed the league with bad teams in bad cities. I watched an old Bruins vs. Capitols game the other night from 1992 and remembered how good hockey used to be. Hockey has a tough road ahead of it. If you think it's going to be hard to put people in over priced seats in way to big arena's to watch a bad product is hard in places like Toronto, Boston and Chicago, good luck in Florida, San Jose and Phoenix.